When My Music Was Your Music

‘Downloaded,’ a Documentary About Napster

Downloaded

The sound of dial-up connections may be quaint in Alex Winter’s “Downloaded,” but not the issues in the film, the latest in VH1’s enlightening series of Rock Docs. In tracing the rapid rise and gradual emasculation of Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that flourished in the 1990s, “Downloaded” tells a fascinating story about how college students harnessed the Internet to enable people to trade favorite songs, and how a blindsided music industry, ignorant of the Web’s potential, effectively shut them down.

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Shawn Fanning in "Downloaded," a documentary about Napster.Credit
VH1 Rockdocs

Shawn Fanning, a programmer, and Sean Parker began Napster while in school. Their creation — a network by which home music databases could be exchanged online — caught on and spread at a phenomenal rate. Eventually, the Recording Industry Association of America, terrified of these upstarts, sued for copyright infringement, as did unlikely allies like the rapper Dr. Dre and the metal band Metallica. Napster, which had hoped to help the industry create a new distribution platform, was forced to jettison its model. (It was later absorbed into Rhapsody.) Out of Napster’s ashes rose iTunes, initially using similar software.

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Sean Parker in "Downloaded."Credit
VH1 Rockdocs

Henry Rollins, Noel Gallagher of the band Oasis, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and others offer insights, but no one is as intriguing as the thoughtful, soft-spoken Mr. Fanning, a onetime idealist thwarted by the piracy label and the dated assumptions of a calcified communications infrastructure.

The wizards landed on their feet: Mr. Parker was a founder of Facebook, and Mr. Fanning entered video game development, among other pursuits. An independent Napster may be gone, but its impact reverberates, not least in the continuing threat to intellectual property.